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Home of The Saturday Evening PostTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:00:36 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1How the Early 1960s Looked to Americanshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/history/post-perspective/how-the-early-1960s-looked-to-americans.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/history/post-perspective/how-the-early-1960s-looked-to-americans.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=93698Even before Kennedy became president, changes were reshaping America. View a gallery of telephones, TVs, cars, and more as they transformed from 1953 to 1963.

John F. Kennedy portrait by Norman RockwellApril 6, 1963Scroll below for a decade of vintage ads and Post art from 1953 to 1963. (Click on images to expand.)

The decade began with a more promising look than the last three: The 1930s had started with the Depression, the 1940s with a world war, and the 1950s with the Korean conflict and the threat of nuclear war.

But the 1960s began with the election of a young, optimistic president who spoke of new opportunities. “Change is the law of life,” John F. Kennedy said, and in his inaugural address, he talked about “a new generation,” “a new alliance for progress,” “a new endeavor,” and “a new world of law.”

Such words were welcome to the younger generation, which had grown up in the shadow of war. They were eager for change, which began as Kennedy took office. But it did not begin with Kennedy alone. The changes that reshaped the country in the 1960s came from developments that started even before Kennedy took office.

In February 1960, months before Kennedy’s election, four black students sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter and asked for service. When denied, they waited quietly and went home when the store closed. The next day, they were back with more students. It was not the first sit-in, but this one caught the attention of the press. The students eventually succeeded in pressuring the store to integrate its lunch counter, which encouraged black students in other college towns to stage their own sit-ins. The era of group protests for civil rights had begun.

On May 10, 1960, The New York Times ran a brief article announcing FDA approval for Enovid for use as an oral contraceptive. Freeing women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy, “the pill” was on its way to revolutionizing the sex life of the country.

On March 1, 1961, President Kennedy signed an order establishing the Peace Corps. Within three months, it had received 11,000 applications from Americans. By 1963, over 7,000 Americans had put their lives on hold for two years to bring technical assistance and goodwill to underdeveloped nations. Today, almost a quarter-million Americans have served in the Corps.

Two months later, President Kennedy ordered 400 Green Beret soldiers to South Vietnam. These “special advisors” were only intended to train the republic’s solders fighting communist guerillas. Kennedy hoped it would be a brief, successful intervention by the U.S. But by the next year, the number of U.S. troops had grown to 50,000. Before the decade was over, America had sent more than half a million soldiers to Vietnam and, coincidentally, created an immense anti-war movement at home.

In September of 1962, Rachel Carson published a book about chemical pesticides’ effects on wildlife. Her Silent Spring led to a Federal inquiry and new restrictions on the use of these chemicals. But the book can also be credited with helping start the modern environmental movement.

In 1963, Betty Friedan proposed writing an article about the unhappiness and discontent among American women. When no magazine accepted the article, she wrote a book on the subject, The Feminine Mystique. Many historians believe it launched the new wave of feminism, which would change the relations between the sexes in our country.

Few Americans could be faulted for not recognizing these early signs of massive change. It was easier to see changes closer to home. One of the most noticeable ways in which life was different in the 1960s was the manner in which many American could spend their free time.

At the close of World War II, they had relied on radio and motion pictures for entertainment; network broadcasting of television shows was virtually nonexistent. Fifteen years later, Americans were spending five hours every night in front of their TV sets. Manufacturers were starting to push color sets, even though major networks didn’t fully switch to color broadcasting until 1967.

1953 AdvertisementZenith TV

1958 AdvertisementWestinghouse TV

1963 advertisementAdmiral Color TV

When they weren’t in front of the television, Americans were spending more time on the telephone. The modern phones of 1963 were portable (i.e., no longer fastened to the wall), used buttons instead of rotary dials, and even had speakers so you could talk on the phone with both hands.

1953 Advertisement Bell telephone

1963 AdvertisementGTE Telephone

1958 AdvertisementBell Telephone

Most Americans knew little about the schools of modern design, but they could tell that their washing machine, which looked so up-to-date in 1953, now looked dated. The newer models were more compact, more efficient, and available in pink!

1953 AdvertisementFrigidaire Washing Machine

1958 AdvertisementGeneral Electric Washing Machine

1963 AdvertisementWestinghouse Washing Machine

Transportation was also changing. Flying had once been a luxury only the rich could afford. Now, more and more Americans were crossing the country by air instead of driving the nation’s pre-interstate highway system. Between 1953 and 1963, the annual civilian air traffic rose from 8 million hours to 15 million.

1953 AdvertisementDouglas Airplanes

1958 AdvertisementAmerican Airlines

1953 AdvertisementChrysler

Meanwhile, 94 million American drivers were supporting the nation’s auto industry that turned out over 7 million cars every year. Anyone shopping for a new car in 1963 would have been struck by how much American auto design had changed over the years. The new cars seemed less enthralled with vast chrome grills. They were lower, sleeker, and more aerodynamic. They had lost the corpulent curves and, though still large, they were styled to reflect a modern idea of simple, straight-lined elegance that implied speed even when the car was standing still.

1953 AdvertisementFord

1958 AdvertisementFord

1963 AdvertisementFord

1953 AdvertisementPontiac

1958 AdvertisementPontiac

1963 AdvertisementPontiac

1953 AdvertisementDodge

1958 AdvertisementDodge

1963 AdvertisementDodge

1958 AdvertisementCadillac

1963 AdvertisementCadillac

1953 AdvertisementCadillac

Over 6.5 million Americans would also have seen change in their weekly copies of the Post. Between 1953 and 1963, the illustration style of the magazine became more impressionistic. By 1963, the magazine had changed to meet Americans’ preference for photographic illustration. Most of the covers featured color photos instead of illustration, and many of the articles inside used full-page and color photography.

Once the Post had dictated popular tastes in American entertainment. Now it hurried to catch up with the popular tastes shaped by the new electronic media.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/history/post-perspective/how-the-early-1960s-looked-to-americans.html/feed0Conformity: The Ladies’ Modelhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/08/28/history/post-perspective/conformity-ladies-model.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/08/28/history/post-perspective/conformity-ladies-model.html#commentsSat, 28 Aug 2010 12:00:41 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=27653 Conformity weighed most heavily on women in the late 1950s. The list of social expectations that seemed to grow continually, yet offer no new rewards.

]]>If there was pressure to conform — as Fromm, Gropius, and Rickover claimed— where did it come from? What did it sound like? Who was responsible?

It’s difficult to point out how society shapes people and their beliefs. The pressure to conform is subtle and, often, unintentional —for men, at least. Women, on the other hand, have a great deal of social instruction thrown at them. Moreover, they are usually handed a large pile of expectations in their teen years. The expectations are often reinforced by the media who were heavy users of clichés and stereotype.

Today, the pressure is less obvious, but in the 1950s, the traditional image of women as nurturers and little else was endlessly repeated in new stories, advertising, and popular entertainment. Here, for example, is Peg Bracken in 1958 telling readers “My Husband Ought To Fire Me!” for not being a cost-effective source of domestic help.

If you are at all attuned to the times, you know that a housewife isn’t a housewife any more. She is a versatile expert, a skilled professional business manager, practical nurse, house cleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess — all this, besides being a gay, well-groomed companion. And she is therefore worth, at prevailing wage rates, about $20,000 a year — or, anyway, a lot more than her husband.

A lot of recent literature has tried to establish this point. Some of it is written by men, and I can’t decide whether they are chivalrous or just cowed. But that quiet tittering you hear in the back row comes from the women, who know different. Housewife, homemaker, it’s still spinach. Women are honest about the important things. This is one of their many lovable qualities.

Well, it is fun to be chucked under the chin, but reaction sets in the minute we housewives — and I think I’ll just continue to use that dirty old world — the minute we housewives really look ourselves in the eye. Practically any housewife who tots up — as I have just totted up — what she’d be worth in today’s labor market is apt to find herself in a nervous condition bordering on the shakes. From my own computations one salient fact emerges loud and clear; all my household skills together wouldn’t earn enough to maintain one small-sized guppy.

In a word, nobody would have me except a husband. What is more, I’d call this a fairly general state of affairs.

Yes, she is being humorous. But humor sits atop reality, and the reality of this article is that the American woman of the 1950s lived with assumptions about her self worth, much of it concerning her ability to cook, clean, raise children, and be pretty happy about the whole deal.

The blunt fact is most housewives are pretty good at a couple of things, fair to middling at a couple of others, and as for the rest, they do them when and if they have to, and lousily. A man never knows which one or two housewifely talents he’s getting when he marries either. No matter what good fudge she made in her bachelor-girl apartment, he can’t be sure! That is one of the things that makes marriage so exciting.

Let’s face it; we housewives are jugglers who, trying to keep a dozen nice big fresh eggs in the air, spend most of our time skidding in the shells. Once in a blue moon, for the fast wink of an eye, all the eggs stay up.

There’s an important item Peg Bracken left out of this article. One of the eggs she juggled was her career as advertising copywriter and free-lance humorist for The Saturday Evening Post. Her article doesn’t mention the pressurs of rewriting, editing, billing, or selling her work. Of the fact that she quietly supported her role as a traditional American woman with a non-traditional job.

There were millions of women like her who tried living within an old-fashioned model of womanhood while taking on un-ladylike work and “mannish” responsibilities. In time, the charade grew tiresome for many women, and they gave up supporting a social role that didn’t support them.

A “women’s liberation movement” arose in the 1960s, offering ideas and demands, some radical and some unarguably sensible. There was resistance, of course, but there were fierce defenders of women’s rights, such as Brigid Brophy who argued “Women Are Prisoners Of Their Sex” in 1963.

So brilliantly has society contrived to terrorize women with [the] threat that certain behavior is unnatural and unwomanly, that it has left them no time to consider – or even sheerly observe — what womenly nature really is. For centuries arrant superstitions were accepted as natural law. The physiological fact that only women can secrete milk for feeding babies was extended to the pure myth that it was women’s business to cook for and wait on the entire family. The kitchen became woman’s “natural” place because, for the first few months of her baby’s life, the nursery really was. To this day a woman may fear she is unfeminine if she can discover in herself no aptitude or liking for cooking.

If a woman who is irked by confinement to the kitchen merely looks around to see what other women are doing and finds they are accepting their kitchens, she may well conclude that she is abnormal and had better enlist her psychoanalyst’s help toward “living with” her kitchen. What she ought to ask is whether it is rational for women to be kept to the kitchen.

I must add a final note about Peg Bracken, who had never believed that women should like the status quo. In 1960, she published “The I Hate To Cook Book,” a humorous guide to preparing fast, easy meals and saving time for something more rewarding. Her preface announced, “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.” This exclusion still left a sizeable number of women: three million readers, in fact.

The book changed her life by making her a celebrity. It produced another, unexpected change when she showed the manuscript to her husband for his opinion. “It stinks,” he said. She decided then that she ought to fire her husband. They were soon divorced.